


Strays

by cenotaphy



Series: What Happened After (Post-Season 11, Pre-Season 12) [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s11e23 Alpha and Omega, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 11, Season/Series 11 Spoilers, sort of, the dog's the only one doing any comforting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:04:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7645897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphy/pseuds/cenotaphy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set about an hour after the end of the season 11 finale. Sam manages to escape Lady Toni Bevell, but may not get far.</p><p>Written in response to the following prompt from <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/fandomnatural/comments/4txk2n/fandomnaturals_biweekly_spn_commentfanworks_meme/">r/fandomnatural's prompt thread</a>: "A stray dog finds Sam."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strays

Lady Toni Bevell has been careless—there's a jagged crack in one of the wall panels in the back of the station wagon she bundled him unceremoniously into an hour before. Sam saws his wrists against the sharp plastic edge, cutting through the rope wrapped around them. He hopes the repetitive rasping can't be heard over the sound of the car's engine. From his position on the floor of the trunk, he can't see much but periwinkle-blue sky, but he guesses from the feel of the motion—which is making him nauseous, he thinks he might be concussed—that they're on a highway.

Then again, he suspects he's meant to have stayed unconscious. After shooting him in the leg, Bevell had rushed forward, and after a brief grappling session in which she showed surprising strength and an intimate knowledge of arm locks, she had managed to clock him on the head with a heavy volume on, of all things, sylph courtship rituals. Dean is never going to let him live this down.

Well. No. Dean is dead. Sam _does_ get to live this down, and every other thing, without his brother.

Assuming he gets out of this mess, anyway. And fuck the world, really, for this mess. He wants a break. He's lost his brother. He's lost his faith. All he wanted to do was crawl into bed at the Bunker and release the tears he wouldn't let himself shed in front of Cas. But God is dead and chance is a bitch with a blonde ponytail and a British accent, and Sam, apparently, does not get a break.

 _Well, joke's on you, Toni_ , he thinks angrily, feeling a trickle of blood run down into his palm, where the broken panel has cut through the skin of his wrists. _I've taken out a lot worse than you, after being shot in_ much _more important places_.

The rope around his wrists gives way suddenly, and with a swell of satisfied relief he tugs his hands free of the coils. He fumbles for the rope around his ankles. Just then the car bumps over something on the road, a sharp jolt that sends agony spiking through his injured leg. Surprise more than anything causes him to let out a pained grunt.

"Awake, Sam?" Lady Bevell's voice rings out from the front of the car. Sam freezes, perfectly still except for his fingers scrabbling at the knot. He hears her shifting, possibly to try to see him, and he hopes the angle and the back of the seat is sufficient to hide that he's half-free. Whether it is or isn't, whatever she sees must be unsatisfactory, for a moment later Bevell pulls the car over and he hears her open the door and get out. With one last frantic yank, the ropes are off his feet, and as Lady Bevell opens the trunk Sam lashes out with his uninjured leg.

He sees, as he kicks, an empty highway bordered by forest, a sinking sun about to paint the sky in the warm colors of evening, and Lady Bevell's curious, calm face. She doesn't have her gun out ( _careless_ , he thinks again) and the side of his foot clips her head and sends her slamming into the side of the car. She slithers down onto the asphalt road with a surprised yelp. Sam feels the force of his kick, knows that it was a glancing one, knows that she's down but not out. He launches himself from the car, ignoring the white-hot knife of pain in his knee, yanking the gag off his mouth with one hand.

It's easy to jump over the guardrail to the woods beyond, easy to put his weight on his right leg as he lands, easy to ignore Bevell's shouted order for him to stop. Less easy is careening down the short slope directly beside the highway, knee on fire, arms windmilling frantically as he tries to keep his balance. A gunshot shatters a branch in front and six inches to the right of him, and he tries to run even faster, bending at the waist to present a smaller target, sacrificing a little of his forward motion for the sake of a slight zigzag path. More gunshots, but either her aim is suddenly terrible, or his feeble evasive maneuvers are effective, or she's unwilling to kill him. Probably a little of all three, he thinks—

The next shot hits him in the shoulder.

The blow, red-hot as if from a heated poker, sends him stumbling. More out of sheer stubbornness than anything else, he manages to keep his footing. His shoulder feels as if it's on fire. _Don't fall_ , he thinks, praying to himself since there is no more God. _Don't fall, don't fall_.

The slope levels out and Sam maintains his staggering run, fighting his way through the thick foliage. The shot was a clean one, straight through the fleshy part of his shoulder. He keeps his left hand clamped over the exit wound as best as he can, trying to staunch the bleeding, though he knows he's running on borrowed time now.

He can hear Lady Bevell crashing down after him, but he has a head start and the will to ignore the crippling inclinations of his gunshot wounds, while she's in those ridiculous heels. The sounds of her pursuit grow fainter until they finally cut off altogether, and Sam vindictively imagines her standing in frustration, a scowl on her too-pretty face.

Sam makes it maybe fifteen more minutes before his leg quits. He's trying to half-slide, half-clamber down a ridge in the forest floor, a crooked bank of earth that might have once been one side of a dry streambed. But when his left foot lands the leg simply collapses, folding in on itself like putty. Sam goes down hard, scraping his hands on rough stones that support his streambed hypothesis. His shoulder explodes in pain as it's forced to take his weight.

 _Get up_ , he orders himself, arms shaking with the effort as he tries to lever himself to a sitting position. But he can't seem to get his knees under him, much less rise to his feet. The bandanna Lady Bevell tied around the limb is neatly done and was working well as a temporary fix, but right now the _temporary_ aspect is making itself very clear. His left hand is covered in blood from the shoulder wound, as is a good part of his shirt. Sam grips the soaked fabric in dismay. How much has dripped off his sleeve, been smeared on the leaves and branches he pushed past? Has he left a blood trail? If so, then he might as well have lit a line of beacons pointing to his current location.

 _Get up_ , he tells himself again, in Dean's voice before he can stop himself, but it's that slip that ends up keeping him down, because it makes him imagine that Dean is standing beside him, and Dean would take one look at the bullet holes and tell Sam that he's not going anywhere. His leg feels like it's been twisted off at the kneecap, like there's a railroad spike attached to the stump, point-first. He's dizzy, nauseous, maybe from the concussion, or maybe from blood loss.

So he rolls over and tucks himself into the shadowed side of the ridge instead, worming in beneath the slight, overhanging lip of earth. He's half-shielded by the arch of several enterprising tree roots that shield his legs, half (he thinks to himself) horribly exposed. He can't stop shivering—blood loss? he thinks again, or maybe just shock, adrenaline? _Get a grip, Sam. Get a grip_. His hands are shaking. He laces the fingers together, pressing them over the wound on his leg. He just needs a rest, just for a little bit. Then he'll get up and retie this makeshift tourniquet. He'll tear a strip from his shirt to bind the shoulder wound. He'll break a branch off a tree and use it as a walking stick. He'll limp his way out of the woods, avoiding Lady Bevell. He'll get back to the bunker— _no, bunker's not safe, can't go back there_ —he'll go find a motel, he'll go find Cas. He can do this. _I can do this_. "You're fine," he whispers aloud, rolling the lie on his tongue. "You're fine, it's fine."

His shoulder is still leaking blood, slowly turning the dirt beneath it into mud. _Stop the bleeding, idiot_ , comes Dean's voice again. Sam grimaces and takes his hand off his knee, which is hurting more but bleeding less and therefore comes second in the eyes of triage. The cloth Bevell used to gag him is still knotted around his neck. He tugs it over his head and slips it over his right arm, pulling it up to the shoulder and twisting it snug. He lies back and jams the shoulder against the ground, hoping to put pressure on the entrance wound, and presses his left hand back down against the exit wound, over the cloth.

The crack of a twig causes him to lift his head warily. He hears slow footsteps, too light to be a human's. Some kind of animal, then. Sam tenses, pressing his back against the earth. The footsteps are coming from the direction he was heading, from deeper in the forest. He's brutally aware of how unarmed he is, how helpless. The sun is sinking ever-lower, the shadows of the trees lengthening like reaching fingers.

The crunching of footsteps gets louder, and then the animal appears on the other side of the streambed.

It's a dog. Sam blinks in surprise. It's medium-sized; its coat is a sort of drab sandy color, and matted with dirt and burrs. It's lean and he can see the faint suggestion of ribs beneath the fur. A stray, he guesses. Not starving, but hungry, for a long time. The dog surveys him for a moment, then leaps down into the streambed and approaches. As it comes closer Sam can see that one of its eyes is dark brown. The other is a cloudy, opaque grey, bisected by a short, diagonal cut. The dog bends to sniff Sam's bloody knee. _If it attacks me I can kick it_ , Sam thinks, and feels an absurd laugh bubble up in his throat, because he's honestly not even sure if he could take a dog at the moment.

He goes for the diplomatic tack instead, extending his left hand toward the animal. "Hey, buddy," he murmurs. "C'mere. It's okay." The dog, which jerked its head up when he moved, stares at him for a minute, its posture rigid, its ears pricked. "Come on," whispers Sam again, keeping his voice lilting, gentle. "I won't hurt you."

The dog leans forward, sniffs his hand, licks his bloody fingers. It doesn't growl. It doesn't bite him. What it does is pad forward and settle itself on the earth next to Sam's chest. Sam breathes out, a relieved, startled sound that catches in his chest. "Hey, buddy," he says again. "Hey. Hey." He scrubs his hand to some semblance of cleanliness on his shirt and reaches out to scratch behind the dog's ears. Unbelievably, the dog wags its tail. _Friendly_ , he thinks in surprise. Maybe not a stray for that long after all. Or maybe it can just tell that right now Sam presents about as much of a threat as an extremely aggressive pigeon.

"You're all alone, huh?" Sam says, stroking the dog's back now. And yes, it's scrawny and dirty, and he can feel the hard cords of muscle and the harder lines of bone beneath his hand, but it's warm and alive and it's not trying to kill him, and the last time Sam felt a touch that met all those criteria, it was his brother hugging him farewell, on his way off to die.

"I'm alone too," says Sam softly. The dog looks at him with its good eye. The scar across the other looks raw and pink, barely healed. A recent wound. "Sorry," says Sam, and manages a chuckle that sounds bitter even to his ears. "I'll cut the self-pity." _Thank fuck_ , Dean chimes in. _Bitch_. "Jerk," Sam spits out into the dim evening air, the word an automatic response to the imagined Dean in his head, but coming out somehow angrier than he had intended it. Simmering behind it are furious questions like _how could you go off and die?_ and _how could God let this happen?_ and _how could you leave me?_ and _it was me, I wanted it to be me, I knew we would have to make a sacrifice but why wasn't it me?_

The tears come then, ugly, long-denied, endless. Sam presses his fist against his mouth and tries to muffle his sobs. The dog licks his cheek.

"I hate them," Sam chokes out, to nobody, to the dog. "God. Amara. Lucifer. The fucking _Men of Letters, London chapter_. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them..." His voice sounds petulant and childish, and he waits for Dean's phantom voice to echo in his head, to tell him to pull it together, to order him to _stop being a freaking baby, Samantha_ , but there's nothing, nothing, only the soft stirring of wind in the darkening treetops and the soft moist breathing of the dog. He's alone. He's _so fucking alone_.

"I'm allowed," Sam rasps weakly to the dog, the seemingly everlasting flow of tears drying up at last. "My brother's dead. He saved the world. I'm allowed to be self-pitying. I'm allowed to—to—" _To what?_ he thinks. Grieve? Whine? Stop trying? Put his feet up? He doesn't know what he expected. Well, he does know what he expected. If the world didn't end—if Dean died saving the world—deep down, Sam knows he expected that the world would stop turning anyway.

As if it can hear him, the dog honest-to-God snorts, a short huff of air. Sam laughs again, and is surprised to find that it isn't forced this time. He looks at the dog more closely, noticing the dirt and grime caked onto the mostly-healed wound on its face. "Hasn't been a good couple of weeks, huh?" he murmurs.

He tugs the cuff of his jacket sleeve forward into his hand, trying to find a spot not damp with blood. The dog stiffens as he raises his hand toward its face. "It's okay," Sam soothes, repeating his earlier mantra. "You're fine. You're fine, it's fine." He keeps up a stream of soft words as he dabs at the cut, cleaning the grime as best as he can. The wound looks well enough along that infection probably isn't a serious threat, but...one can't be too careful, and fuck, right now Sam just wants to feel like he's _fixing_ something.

The dog tolerates the prods of the jacket sleeve for a minute, then makes a low whine in the back of its throat and shakes his hand off. It scoots forward and rests its head on its front paws, leaning against Sam's chest. Sam lets his breath out in a long, slow exhale. He can feel the warmth of the animal, like a sun pressed against his sternum. "You're fine," he mumbles. "We're fine, it's fine." He rests his hand between the dog's shoulder blades, scratching at the fur there. He feels drained, woozy almost, and he hopes the fabric of the gag is slowing the bleeding. "I'm going to rest for a moment," he tells the dog, his voice barely audible even to his own ears. The animal twitches its tail at his words, but its eyes—good and bad—are closed. It looks like it's asleep, or nearly there.

Sam keeps going, his own eyes drifting closed as well. "Then I'll...then I'll get up, and we'll get out of here. We'll get somewhere safe, I'll take a look at that cut, okay? Get you some real food. We'll be okay. I'll deal with this shit. It's fi—"

"Hello hello."

The trim, candied voice is unmistakable. Sam jerks in surprise, his head snapping up as he jolts back to wakefulness. The dog lifts its head too, surveying Lady Bevell without alarm. Probably knew she was coming. _Thanks for the warning, dog,_ Sam thinks _._

Lady Bevell smiles at him. "You left a lot of blood on the floor of my trunk, Sam Winchester." Her gun is in her hand; a set of silvery handcuffs dangles from her belt. "Plenty for a locator spell. I did change my shoes, you'll notice." She wiggles one foot gracefully—she's wearing sleek black combat boots that look only marginally better for running through the woods than her heels did.

Sam grins without humor. "You had...a fucking...locator spell, and it still took you this long to track me?" He's exhausted, he notes almost clinically. The effort required for speaking seems to have increased exponentially. He subtly tries to put more weight on his right arm, testing it, wondering if he can launch himself at her before she get can get the gun up. The flare of agony in his shoulder is not promising. "Makes...sense. Guess us jumped-up hunters are better at some things, huh?"

The smile slides off her face. "I see you found yourself a friend. That's so sweet." She flicks her empty hand at the dog. "Run along now, you. Sam's coming with me."

Sam struggles up onto one elbow, but he knows it's hopeless. He isn't even sure he can stand, although he suspects Lady Bevell is going to make him find out shortly. Getting the drop on her is out of the question. "Fuck off," he croaks.

Her voice gets colder. "Mind your manners, Sammy, or I'll put a third bullet in you."

"Don't... _call me_...that." The spike of fury in his chest startles him, because it shouldn't matter, in the scheme of things. But no one gets to call him that, not anymore, not now that Dean—

Lady Bevell huffs in impatience and takes a step forward. Instantly the dog is on its feet, hackles rising, teeth bared. Its low growl sounds like rough stones clattering over one another.

Bevell's gun hand snaps up, the weapon pointed between the dog's eyes. Sam can hear alarm in the sharp hiss of her breath. "Call off your pet, Winchester. Bloody hell, did you have that thing waiting here to meet you?"

" _It_ found _me_ ," says Sam, bemused. The inevitability of his capture has a strangely calming effect, he's discovering. Or maybe he's about to pass out.

"Hey," he tells the dog, pushing it gently away from him. "Just...go, buddy. Get out of here." "Go."

The dog turns and looks at him with its good eye, and Sam feels a pang of regret. Just one more thing he couldn't protect. One more thing he'd promised to care for, and not made good on his word. But the dog will be okay, he tells himself, and he knows he's right, can see it in the sinewy muscle of the animal's legs, the strength and spareness of its frame. It's been caring for itself already, for who knows how long. It doesn't need him, didn't need him. Maybe the other way around, really.

He pushes it again, not with force, but insistently. "Go."

The dog turns and licks his hand, and then it's off, trotting along the stream bed into the murky twilight. From his curled position on the ground, Sam watches it go.

"Cute," says Lady Bevell drily, and then, in a different tone, not the smug one she's adopted since Sam met her but something sincere, off-guard, "I didn't want to shoot it, truly. But I would have."

Sam looks at her, half-invisible in the semi-dark, her blonde hair like a pale coil of mist. "You don't seem to point your gun at very many things you aren't willing to shoot, Lady Toni Bevell."

"True." She shifts her arm to aim the gun at Sam. "So let's go for a walk, Winchester."

 


End file.
